Obihai is excited to announce official support for Google Voice. With a Google Voice account and a companion OBi device you can make and receive VoIP calls on a regular telephone. To get started, just login to the OBiTALK website, add your OBi device and select Google Voice as your service. You’ll then confirm your account with Google, and within minutes, you will be making and receiving calls from the comfort and convenience of your home phone. “With a Google Voice account configured on an OBi device, users will not only get all the great collaboration tools and app integration with Google Voice, they will also be able to enjoy many premium calling features, free calling within the U.S. and Canada and super-low cost international calling – all from the comfort of their home phone," said Jan Fandrianto, President and CEO of Obihai.

OBi Devices Make a Great Companion for Google Voice• Place and Receive Calls with Your Google Voice Number on Regular Phones• Call Internationally at Low Rates to Over 150 Destinations.• Premium Features Included for Free Like Voicemail, Call Waiting, Telemarketer Blocking, Caller ID

You can now enjoy all the benefits of Google Voice on your OBi device, including features like personalized greetings, call blocking, SMS to email, and voicemail transcription. OBi users can also take advantage of Google Voice’s low calling rates. Today, calling the U.S. is free from the U.S. & Canada and 1¢ per minute from everywhere else. International calling rates are also really low, with per minute rates starting at 1¢ to Beijing, Bangalore, Mexico, Brazil and 150 other destinations – with no connection charge.* What's more, OBi users get premium features like Caller ID, telemarketer (spam) call blocking, call waiting, 3-way calling, and voicemail that acts like email – including voice message alerts by text and email with speech to text transcription.

The OBi device is a phone adapter which allows anyone to make and receive calls with a regular cordless or corded 'house' phone. Calling can be done by dialing a regular phone number. Receiving calls is easy. When someone dials your Google Voice number, the phone connected to your OBi device will ring. The OBi phone will ring if the user’s Google Voice number is called or if the user’s Google ID is called via Hangouts or Gmail. Also, since Google Voice does not support 911 calling, for a small fee, the OBi device may be set-up with a dedicated E911 VoIP service.

This is good news, but it would have been better news if Google Voice wasn't officially unsupported earlier this year, prompting many to go buy annual plans with other providers.

This.

Tried Vestalink, and it didn't work for a variety reasons. I then switched to Ooma a few months ago, and been there ever since. Higher upfront cost, and about $4/month, but E911 is included, and don't need to subscribe to a separate service for it. Plus, switching from Obi to Ooma was for the best. With Obi + Google Voice, I often had issue with some calls going to Google Voice mail, rather than my local answering machine. With Ooma, I obviously don't have that issue, and calls go through much quicker.

So, yeah, great news for people who still use Obi devices, but for me, too little too late

Just to confirm; this latest announcement about Obihai now supporting Google Voice, makes the earlier anouncenments about Google Voice not being surported because Google plan on discontinuing XMPP support obsolete?

I am sure I am not the only one totally confused over all these convoluted statements from Obihai. It has been several months since Obihai made these statement about Google Voice not supporting XMPP and therefore no Obihai support.

I too have switch to OOMA because of these statements.

Can anyone at Obihai make a clear explanation in plain English about what the heck is going on???

I don't know what to make of this news. It's not that good for me since I was perfectly happy with GV before all the talk of GV non-support. I switched to Vestalink and I am not too impressed. I do have a good deal for the moment and I like not having to get E911 from a separate provider. Still, I can't help but think I have been jerked around by Obi and I still don't know what this really means.

I will be watching this thread to see if anyone can shed some light on what is truly going on here.

Jeeeez. If Obihai and Google gave you a gigantic 24-carat gold plated toilet, would you instead shit on their doorsteps? Read the posts in the rest of the forum today. This is a GOOD THING, you whiners.

This has been posted several other places already, but admittedly, the forum is hard to search or to navigate to the posts. So, here is a more-complete set of directions:

These instructions have been updated to be current and accurate as of January, 2018

Note: If you haven't upgraded the firmware on your OBi device in the past year or longer, then you must upgrade it now, so that your device includes support for Google's approved authentication protocol. You can download the latest firmware for free, regardless of the age or warranty status of your device, here in the forum's firmware section: http://www.obitalk.com/forum/index.php?topic=9.0. Scroll through, read and follow the firmware installation instructions. Caution: The "latest" firmware build links in Obihai's firmware section may not be truly the latest! You may need to read through the firmware section of this forum to learn about new issues fixed by specific firmware build numbers, and the specific locations of those versions.

If you don't have any other service providers already configured on your OBi box, the cleanest thing to do is to log onto the OBiTALK portal, and delete your OBi device off of your account. Then, factory reset the device, and add it back again.

Otherwise, if you already have some other (SIP) SPs you wish to keep, and/or some custom settings, then log onto the OBiTALK portal and just delete the Google Voice SP(s) you had previously configured.

If you are taken to the new Google Voice web interface, instead of the old, "Legacy" page, you will need to click the three horizontal bar ("hamburger") icon in the upper left corner of the page, then scroll down and click "Legacy Google Voice" to get to the old version of the settings page, which includes the Google Chat setting.

Verify that you see the exact two words "Your number" on the left side of the page, not "Access Number" or "Get a number", which would indicate that you don't have your own GV number.

If you only want to place outbound calls via GV's service, using your OBi, then you don't need your own, dedicated inbound GV telephone number. Otherwise, you must either get a GV number from Google's pool of available numbers, or port in a mobile phone number to GV. In order to get a new GV number, you must also add at least one legitimate (paid, not freebie), working, US-based forwarding phone number to the list, that can receive a verification call from Google. This is a fraud and abuse-prevention measure. Once you've completed this step, you can optionally disable or delete the forwarding number used for verification.

Verify that you also have "Google Chat" listed as one of your forwarding targets on the list. If you want to receive calls via GV on your OBi, you must have a check mark next to Google Chat. Note: Google has discontinued all of its own "Chat" or "Talk" clients, which have been superseded by Google Hangouts. However, Google is leaving the so-called "Chat" (actually, XMPP) protocol in place to support OBi users.

If you are going to forward inbound calls to a SIP ITSP (Callcentric, Anveo, voip.ms, etc.) phone number, instead of to Chat, then don't check the Chat box, but instead, add and check-mark the SIP ITSP phone number to your GV forwarding phone list, and later, add it to your OBi as another Service Provider (e.g. GV on SP1 and Callcentric on SP2).

Note: before you can use an OBi device to place calls with a Google account, you must make at least one phone call from any of Google's own user interfaces (desktop/laptop computer Hangouts web page: https://hangouts.google.com/ or via the Android or iOS Google Voice or Hangouts apps.). This is so that you read and confirm your agreement to Google's Terms of Use legal requirements.

Remain logged into your GV account on its web browser tab. Go back to your OBiTALK portal page in the other browser tab.

Add GV as a service provider. When you go through the procedure, it will use OAUTH 2.0 to authenticate to your GV account. This will pop up a window, from your Google account, and it will ask you to approve giving OBiTALK permission for offline access to your account. Verify that the Google account shown in the pop-up window is the correct account you want to use with your OBi. After you approve, the OBiTALK provisioning system will go through the authentication process with Google, and it will automatically download the necessary firmware to your device, if it's not already installed. You will see a spinner icon next to "Configuring" while this is happening. If the spinner icon doesn't go away after about 5 minutes, refresh the web browser page, and the status should change to "Connected". You can't make this work properly without using the portal.

Set up 911 service as appropriate, using a SIP ITSP of your choice, or, on a OBi 110, using a POTS land line.

When I received email, I was too thinking it might be some real old email accidentally sent out again.

When I found the GV was still working after 5/15, I basically just adopted wait-and-see approach instead of jumping ship right away. But I always thought eventually it will end. I am so glad that I can now feel free to continue the combo of Obi100 + GV.